Chp.43: Disputes between brothers

After the battle was finally over, Haku and his two brothers went back and called their sisters to go and collect whatever they could gain from it together. Their sisters had asked questions and Haku had told them everything; for a moment they had looked worried, but Rhaegal had signaled them to shut up and looked at them strangely, as if he was warning them to keep their mouths shut.

Haku knew that his brother was mad at him, he could see it even if he wasn't an expert in relationships. Rhaegal hadn't spoken to him since he'd helped kill their mother with the nullification rune. Darbi too had become a little more taciturn, even if on the way back he had continued to try to talk to both of them, perhaps trying to make them reconcile. His attempts hadn't worked, but Haku didn't care: if Rhaegal had a problem, he could tell him to his face, and he would have been happy to solve it. Until then, he had other things to think about.

The dragons had quickly returned to the devastated city; Haku was sure he didn't have to worry about the ogres, because after that series of catastrophes they wouldn't have gotten close for a while. Exploiting the opening created by the divine arrow, they had ripped apart their mother's body from the inside and placed it in their dimensional bags. Luckily they had quite a few in excess and plenty of refrigerators too. Just their mother's body provided them with another 600 tons of meat, but they also had the bodies of tens of thousands of fairies which, although damaged, were still edible. About 50,000 fairies had in fact been killed not by fire, but by shock waves, earthquakes or water; putting their pieces together wasn't difficult thanks to the dragons' noses, and they didn't even have to worry about what the ogres would have thought since anyone in their place would have believed that the dragon had simply charred all the faeries. Considering that each fairy weighed an average of 50 kilos, all together they provided around 2,500 tons of food. Which added to the 600 tons of dragon meat, it made 3,100 tons. Haku and his siblings, thanks to the supplies they had procured in the previous months, already had 7,200 tons; as a result, in total they now possessed 10,500 tons of food. Much more than the amount needed to survive into adulthood. Which was good: Haku lived by the precept that prevention was always better, so he didn't dislike having more than 3,000 tons of food in extra than his initial plan.

Of course, food wasn't the only payoff. Haku and his siblings had combed the city and had taken away the magical items that seemed to have the most value, leaving behind those they already knew or deemed useless. Haku wished he could get his hands on that strange spear, but unfortunately he didn't find it; evidently the fairy who had used it had taken it away. Once they had taken everything that might interest them they had gone, leaving the rest to the ogres: Haku was sure that Sarpa would have appreciated the gift. He had even left him some of his mother's scales and blood as an extra: it couldn't be said that he hadn't been generous.

While doing all this, his siblings had kept away from him, and this had allowed Haku to rearrange his thoughts. Now he knew that gods existed, which wasn't a good thing at all. However, based on what he had seen, perhaps they weren't as omnipotent as the stories of the newcomers claimed.

First of all, why hadn't the divine arrow killed his mother? The blow had hurt her badly, but not enough to kill her. If it weren't for Haku and the fairy who had hurled the spear to destroy her mana core, Neytiri would have recovered easily from that attack. So if the gods wanted to defend the people who worshiped them, why not kill the dragon completely?

Second, why fire a single blow? The divine arrow had badly damaged Neytiri, consequently it would have been enough to launch another or at most two more to kill her. Instead immediately after that attack the divine intervention had immediately ceased, leaving the dragon all the time necessary to recover and to get even more angry towards the fairies. So why do it?

Third, why wait so long to intervene? According to the stories of newcomers, the gods were supposed to be omniscient. As a result, they should have known immediately that Neytiri was coming to destroy the fairy capital. Why not hit her while she was still coming there? Or even better, why not hit Haku as soon as he started to deceive her with his illusions? And once Neytiri had arrived at the city, why not do something about it right away? Why intervene only at the last moment?

All these clues had led Haku to believe that the gods weren't omnipotent at all. If they were, then they would have killed Neytiri right away. And besides, Haku was sure that the rules that for each attack a certain amount of energy had to be used also applied to them. That would have explained why they had waited so long to intervene, and only when the dragon promised to slay the people who worshiped them. And it also explained why the gods didn't interfere much in wars and mortal affairs. Perhaps, just as every living creature had a limit on how much mana it could use with a certain amount of energy, the gods too had a limit on how much 'divine power' (in the absence of further data, Haku would have called it that) they could use with the energy they possessed.

Of course, it was possible that he was completely wrong. There was the chance that the gods were indeed omnipotent and acted that way for reasons beyond his understanding. However, Haku thought it very unlikely. He found hard to believe that there could really be a being of unlimited power in the world. He still had many doubts about the nature of the gods, he didn't know if they were a race of their own or different types of newcomers, but he was pretty sure his main hypothesis was correct. If that were true, that would have meant that not even a god, at least alone, could defeat a full-grown dragon, since their attack hadn't been able to bring down Neytiri.

In any case, they were at least for the moment a danger to him and his siblings. Haku would have had to be very careful not to attract the attention of these gods. However, he could easily avoid it: the gods had never intervened during all those months, so they either didn't care about him or they preferred not to waste their divine power just for him. By now he had already gotten all the food that he needed and even more; if he kept a low profile for the next few years, as he planned to do, the gods would have had no reason to take action against him. Once he was an adult… he would have thought about it then.

Once they had finished collecting everything, Haku and his siblings returned to their cave and there concluded the preparations for the journey. It would have been difficult to carry around the hundreds of dimensional bags, so they had used a trick to cheat the system: they had stuffed the dimensional bags inside other dimensional bags. They had divided them equally and then put them into seventeen dimensional bags, and each of them had taken one and tied it around their neck. That way, they could carry them without major problems and it would also have been impossible to lose them since they were just in one and attached to their throat.

"Good. We took everything" Haku said as he carried Sinar, Sarpa's son, on his shoulders. "Now we are going to return this boy to his father, and then we will leave. We have completed the preparations, so our journey can begin"

Darbi and a few others made some satisfied comments, but many others didn't even pretend to be excited. Haku had noticed that they gave him strange looks since they had gone to the ruins of the city to loot the lootable. In particular, Kotaru gave him a scolding look, while Rhaegal seemed both angry with him but afraid to yell at him.

Haku snorted, rolling his eyes. He'd expected his siblings to be hostile to him for a while, but it was really annoying to put up with it in real life. "Is there any problem?" he asked to Rhaegal himself.

His brother seemed undecided whether to speak or not, but then he plucked up his courage and bellowed: "A problem? Our mother's dead body is a problem! Haku, are you even aware of what you did? You killed our mother!"

"Yes, just like I killed our father some months ago. I don't think you were that upset then" Haku replied.

"It's a different situation!" Rhaegal exclaimed. "And by the way, it remains the fact that you went behind our backs! We are supposed to be a family!"

"We are a family! And in a family, some protect others, even by doing things that others wouldn't do!" Haku responded. "I went behind your back precisely because I knew this would have been your reaction!"

"That doesn't justify you! We should make our decisions together!"

"But some decisions can't be discussed, they just have to be made!"

"And do you think you know which decisions need to be made and which not better than all of us?"

"Yes, I think so! And I say I've had it confirmed several times!"

Rhaegal fell silent. His eyes widened and he put on an expression somewhere between surprised, scared, and indignant. Haku took advantage of her silence to continue: "You wouldn't have wanted to do it, but we had to do it! I knew it had to be done and I did it, because our survival depended on it! I deceived our mother because we had to find out if gods existed or else no, and apparently they exist and therefore they are a real danger! And I killed our mother with the nullification rune because she smelled our scent, and she would have come after us if she lived! Everything I did, I did to keep you safe! How can you not see it!?"

Haku brought his muzzle close to Rhaegal's one. His brother tried to back away, but Haku didn't give him time or forced him to look him straight in the eyes. Rhaegal seemed to shrink under her menacing gaze. "When you and Darbi came looking for me, you asked me what I was doing. Well, this is my answer: I'm keeping you and everyone else here alive!" he growled. "Every single action I've taken, every deception, every strategy, every hunt, every plan, every experiment, I've done them exclusively for you! To keep everyone of you alive! And if I know that something needs to be done, then I do it, because the alternative is to expose ourselves to unnecessary risk! Therefore, don't blame me if I acted on my own knowing that you wouldn't want to do what had to be done!"

Rhaegal seemed to lose his anger completely and only fear remained in his eyes. He clearly wanted to get away from his brother's menacing gaze, but he seemed to be scared to even flinch.

But suddenly someone put his paw on Haku's shoulder. "Ok, that's enough, brother. Rhaegal understands, leave him alone now"

Haku turned around and saw Kotaru staring at him with serious eyes. For a moment he was tempted to ignore her, but then he thought there was no reason to make her angry. He had made his reasons clear and everyone had heard them, now all he had to do was wait for them to accept them and understand that they were right. "Okay" he said, pulling away from Rhaegal. "Sorry, I was a bit abrupt"

"Yeah... Don't worry. It's all right. I acted like an idiot too" Rhaegal replied, but still he took several steps away and stared at him sideways, never taking his eyes off him, as if he expecting him to attack him at any moment.

Haku didn't pay much attention to it. Now that the inconvenience was resolved, he could worry about what really mattered. "Come on, we have a long journey ahead" he said, and he walked out of the cave. His siblings followed him, though many of them kept a distance from him.